When I started writing this piece, I’d noted that one of the few things the federal government had managed to not stuff up in recent months was crumbling to pressure and rushing off to build expensive open-air quarantine facilities.
As it turns out, that praise was premature, with the Morrison government announcing it will sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Victoria to build a facility in Avalon.
While ending hotel quarantine is critical, the call to urgently build quarantine facilities is a year too late and unnecessarily shifts attention from the Big Show: vaccinating at least 50% of Australians.
The demands to create quarantine are the wrong solution to an obvious problem: hotel quarantine is not fit for purpose. While turning leisure and corporate hotels into temporary prisons has actually been reasonably effective, more than 100 leaks has shown that it isn’t a suitable medium-term solution.
While critics like Mary-Louise McLaws and Mike Toole are absolutely correct in pointing to the airborne nature of COVID-19, they take an unpragmatic approach to solving the problem they correctly diagnosed, like most health experts who haven’t worked in the commercial world.
The solution to the airborne nature of COVID-19 isn’t to spend several billion dollars developing Howard Springs clones near every capital city airport but to supercharge the rollout of vaccines, which have been shown to prevent death and hospitalisation in almost 100% of people.
While the purported cost of the single facility in Victoria with 500 beds is $200 million, some estimate the cost will end up closer to $700 million.
So, let’s look around the world, given no other country is planning to build more quarantine centres. Israeli data indicates that when you hit 70% immunity (through a combination of high-efficacy vaccines and recovery), deaths and transmissions are reduced to near zero. But Israel is the high watermark — Britain has fully vaccinated only 39% of its population and deaths have been reduced to well below regular flu-season levels.
So, let’s work backwards.
To hit 50% coverage (above UK levels), 12.5 million Australians need to be vaccinated or 25 million doses provided. We have done almost five million now, so that’s another 20 million needed. The Victorian lockdown has led to a renewed urgency with vaccinations and as second doses of AstraZeneca start being doled out, we’re likely to see a sustained level of one million weekly doses from here on. That’s 20 weeks to turn COVID-19 into the flu, a virus we have co-existed with for centuries.
At a million doses per week we’d be at “Israel coverage” by just after Christmas. Even better, Victoria is on track to have partially vaccinated more than 70% of people aged over 40 by the end of the month. In case you were wondering about how effective vaccines are, a 99-year-old vaccinated Victorian contracted COVID-19 last week and was asymptomatic (without the vaccine, she would have statistically had around a 30% mortality risk).
By the time the fresh-air quarantine facilities are built, it will be probably February 2022. By then every Australian who wants to be vaccinated will have been, and the rest of the developed world will have been largely open for six months. Rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on white elephant quarantine facilities, the federal government would be better off rewarding every vaccinated person with a $100 restaurant voucher (which also has the benefit of helping struggling small food businesses).
By then, with a vaccinated population, we would be able to join Europe, the Middle East and the US in allowing quarantine-free travel — and the need for taxpayer-funded short-term prisons with sky-high price tags will be a distant memory.
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we cannot ‘surge’ vaccination without supply
we are now at the back of the queue to buy more Pfizer
supplies of other brands are at the announcement stage
and we are reliant on a single factory for AZ production
this adds up to a slow shuffle into 2022
and follow that ‘white elephant’ over the horizon
pandemics are more likely than they were 100 years ago,
when we purpose built quarantine stations at points of entry,
with climate change, deforestation, and zoonotic transmission.
quarantine stations might end up being a good investment
and easy to adapt to other emergency accommodation demands
bush fires, floods, plagues, there will be more of these too
this is long term planning, not much of it around these days
Maybe you mean “movies about pandemics are more likely than they were 100 years ago”
Come back to us, Adam, when you have a Doctorate in Virology or Epidemiology. Otherwise, you are out of your depth here. You’re just a business commentator.
Not even that, regarding your last sentence. Maybe a couple of future viruses will, in time, convince you Adam.
Wow another mindless and self servicing piece of dribble from Crikey’s own sky news reporter (well with stuff like this that would be Adam’s natural home). Its mindless, as purpose build quarantine will be the most effective means to stop the bug getting lose in Oz. We do also need them….how many times just this century have we almost had a pandemic….they will be useful now and into the future. Self serving because as usual its all about getting those tourist $$ back in his pocket. Regardless of vaccines it is highly likely that we will have issues with this bug or the next ones into the future and getting back to world wide unrestricted travel is going to be very dodgy. Time to rethink that one!!
“the call to urgently build quarantine facilities is a year too late and unnecessarily shifts attention from the Big Show: vaccinating at least 50% of Australians…. spending hundreds of millions of dollars on white elephant quarantine facilities…”
Agree entirely that vaccines are the first priority. But it is total bollox to argue that vaccination programmes will be hurt by also constructing adequate quarantine facilites, and even worse bollox to imagine that because such facilities will not be ready for some time they must be white elephants. Only a moron imagines that this epidemic is the last one ever.
Also absolute fallacy to assume that these quarantine facilities will actually be 100% immune to breaches.
Can already see the howls of outrage on these pages when we have a leak from one.
What will we do with these facilities if, as is the case now, there is not another pandemic for 100 or 20 or even 10 years or so, mothball them? They will rot and decay like old unused football stadiums in the US or Europe.
Within 10 years it will be cheaper to build a new one than to refurbish the rotted decayed hulks of unused facilities.
I would entertain the idea of them if we had got on the front foot and built them in the first few months as an experiment to see if they actually are effective.
Only vaccination works, everything else is a distraction from the real game in town.
You seem to totally ignore that different countries are using different vaccines with different rates of efficacy, and that variants will continure to arise until ALL countries are largely vaccinated which may be 2-3 years away at best. And with more variants comes the risk that current vaccines will lose efficacy and require new doses (for which we may well be at the back of the queue again). Nor do you consider that this is unlikely to be the last virus that requires quarantining overseas travellers, or that the new quarantine facilities being considered could have other uses. A very short-sighted article that doesn’t touch on many of the important issues. Disappointing